Arthropod pests such as flies, mosquitoes, and ticks are responsible for disease and loss of life among humans and other animals, and incur financial losses associated with loss of work productivity due to illness and health care costs. Among the increasing number of arthropod-borne diseases, only a few are preventable by vaccines. For example, there is no effective vaccine against malaria, and the only way to avoid the disease is avoidance of a mosquito bite, which is difficult to achieve in environments where mosquitos thrive. For this reason, the first lines of defense for humans includes the use of bite-blocking fabrics (e.g., tightly woven clothing and netting) and/or the application of chemical repellents to a fabric and/or skin.
New functional textiles with insect repellency have been developed for use in clothing, netting, and tents, and typically consist of a textile that is coated with an insect repellent chemical compound, such as a pyrethrin and/or pyrethroid. These compounds have low-toxicity profiles towards humans, and effectively control a variety of insect pests. Despite these favorable characteristics, the utility of the pyrethrins and pyrethroids in textiles is limited because of their relatively short-lived insecticidal action. This is due to the poor washing fastness of repellent textile finishing formulas and the decomposition of the compounds into non-active, non-insecticidal products in the presence of oxygen and ultraviolet light. Therefore, it would be an advantage to have an insect repellant functional textile, fabric or cloth that maintains insect repellant properties despite multiple wash cycles, abrasion, and/or exposure to ultraviolet light or oxygen, and that does not use a chemical insecticide that exudes a repellant vapor.